Shake Shack Got Me Shook But In A Bad Way
Being from California, I had only ever heard of Shake Shack from movies and TV shows. When Lilly threw out the opening of a Shack Shack on their block as a reason not to move to Italy in the penultimate season of How I Met Your Mother, my interest was piqued.
To be referenced in TV shows and movies, I imagined that it must be on par with the oft-referenced In-N-Out. Of course, I realize now that there is absolutely no basis in reality for such an idea. Any brand, quality or not, can pay to be mentioned on TV. Still, the references were made by adults, not kids, so I dissociated Shack Shake from McDonald’s and its ilk. Again, I realize my naivete in thinking that only children like McDonald’s; however, that was my bias at the time, so if ever I had the chance to try the fare at Shake Shack, I was game.
I assumed I would have to wait until I made my way back east at some point in the distant future before I ever had that opportunity. So, you can imagine my surprise when I got off the 405 at Western and saw a brand new Shack Shack right across the street from the hotel where I would be staying. I made a plan for lunch the following day.
The Good
I don’t mind admitting that I am a little apprehensive about blindly venturing into new businesses. Particularly restaurants. There was a time, not so long ago, when you didn’t need instructions to place an order at a fast-food restaurant. Now, every fast food restaurant is a variation of Subway’s bespoke sandwich model, but less intuitive. I feel like Michael Keaton ordering at McDonald’s for the first time in The Founder every time I walk into a restaurant I’ve never tried before.
I know what a sandwich is and what I want on it. I don’t know what the fuck a Poke is, so when I walk into a Poke shop and see a cryptic menu board with pictures of every item they sell and instructions that say, “Pick your protein” and “Build Your Bowl,” I’m going to turn around and walk back out the door, and I have. A tip to restauranteurs at every level of the game: Wow us with your recipes, not with your gimmicky, experimental ordering processes.
Be Careful What You Wish For
If I wanted to pick every ingredient that goes into my meal, I would eat at home. That’s the beauty of going out to eat. Someone else went to the trouble of finding recipes that work and taste good, and all I have to do is pick the one that looks the most appetizing.
Many years ago, I went to a new “Build Your Own Burger” restaurant. The place was ahead of its time, and that’s probably why it went under. They used tablets to order instead of people. It would be another decade and a half before I would see that technology in use again.
On the tablet, you selected how many patties you wanted and what kind of bun, and then you scrolled down a list of every possible ingredient you could think of to add to a hamburger. At first glance, I thought I had finally found the perfect burger. I built one with all of the toppings I love on a burger: cheese, onion rings, a fried egg, pickles, bacon, and god only knows what else — it was fifteen years ago. I realize now that getting everything you ever wanted never works out the way you think it will.
Ordering a pizza with every meat the pizzeria offers sounds good, but it just ends up tasting like spicy grease. Likewise, a burger with a bunch of things you like to eat separately does not mean they will complement each other on a piece of meat between two buns. Ever since then, I have gladly allowed the professionals in the test kitchen to create my meals for me.
With all of that in mind and not knowing what to expect when I walked into my first Shake Shack experience, I decided to peruse the menu in the car before I went inside. I was elated to discover the menu is not only totally normal but that you can order online and walk inside to pick up your food. When I went inside ten minutes later to pick up my order, I learned that that’s how you order inside the restaurant as well. An island in the middle of the lobby area of the dining room had three tablets mounted to one side and two condiment stations on the other.
The Bad
It was a curious design choice, considering there was no other way to order a meal inside the restaurant. There were no cash registers where you could place an order with a live person. There was, however, a long counter that would conventionally have had cash registers on it. Why build the long cash register counter if you’re not going to use cash registers? Is it just in case they change their mind down the road? Is ordering via app an experiment and the results aren’t in yet?
Why do certain vestiges survive innovation? Last year, I rented a Hyundai Ionic 5 because Hertz was all out of Teslas. I hated everything about that car, especially the mélange of chargers that, despite the brand or network they belonged to, never had a fully functioning charging station. I had a problem every time I tried to charge that stupid car. What I couldn’t understand about its design, though, was why it looks like just another conventional gas-powered car. Conventional car designs work around the necessities of the drive train and fuel system. Electric cars have none of that, so they don’t have to look like conventional cars. The Cyber truck is a(n) great example of that.
Innovate Or Don’t
Telsa replaced every knob, dial, and gauge with a screen. I know many people don’t like that, but those people are Luddites, and their opinions are irrelevant. We’re living in a strange transition period where automakers have to make cars with one wheel in the future and one in the past to ease people out of their comfort zones. Or, they could be like Tesla and say fuck it and build a great car and show people what the future could be.
All that is to say, if you’re going to go to the trouble of building a brand new restaurant from the ground up with revolutionary new processes for ordering and delivering products to the customer, why would you leave irrelevant vestiges in the design? Especially space-consuming ones. Why build a single square foot more than you need?
I have been back since my initial visit, and they have two cash registers at the end of the counter, now.
The other thing I didn’t understand was why there were so damn many employees. There were as many or more than I have seen working at any In-N-Out or Five Guys. So many of them didn’t seem to have anything to do either. They were sort of wandering around, like Mii’s on the Wii home screen, trying to look busy. The result was a chaotic and congested dining room. Employees were constantly bumping into customers as they came around the corner from the kitchen area.
She Brings The Shake to The Shack
In every business, there is always one employee keeping the whole operation going. At this Shake Shack, it was a heavy-set woman with a headset. She took orders from the drive-through, poured all of the drinks, and took a meeting with the douchey, thirty-something blonde man that I assume was the franchisee. He looked like a “bro” whose daddy got tired of financing his Spring Break lifestyle, so he bought him a Shake Shack franchise. Now, he shows up once a week in an untucked polo, Vans, and a trucker cap. He sets up his computer in a booth – during the lunch rush – and gets in the way of his employees as they scramble around the store, trying to look busy—all except that one dutiful employee, who handled being pulled in three different directions with perfunctory grace.
Rack ‘Em Up
Just outside the kitchen area, against the wall on the opposite side of the passthrough from the useless counter, was a metal baker’s rack. Another curious choice. They went to the expense of building a ten-foot long, totally useless countertop, only to bring in a piece of furniture to place completed orders on. Did someone just wake up one morning and decide to play restaurant?
Again, since my initial visit, they replaced the rolling baker’s rack with a permanent one.
Occasionally, an employee would place a bag on the metal rack for customers to pick up. While I sat at a table across from the rack, I watched two different employees place two orders there. Another employee placed a bag on the long, useless counter, and it sat there for several minutes, transferring the heat from the contents inside to the surrounding air, before yet another employee came from somewhere behind me, possibly outside, and put the bag on the rack.
I’m Not Rich
The receipt stuck to the outside of the bag had “Rich” printed on it in bold lettering. That annoyed me. I didn’t consent to any nicknames. I immediately got up to grab my food. The employee had barely set it down when I reached for it. I startled him. He apologized to me but didn’t specify for what. It perturbed me that they called me “Rich,” but there’s no way he knew that. I supposed it was for abandoning my lunch to cool for several minutes on the useless counter. I soon came to realize it was for the overpriced abomination in the bottom of an awkwardly large paper bag.
The Burger
As I pulled my burger out of the bag, it occurred to me that I made a mistake. Occasionally, while enjoying a dipped cone, Oreo Twister, or Sundae from Foster’s Freeze or Dairy Queen, I would notice hamburgers and other non-dessert items on the menu and wonder who would order a hamburger at an ice cream shop. Apparently, I would.
That’s not to say that an ice cream shop can’t make a good burger, but what are the odds that they do? I don’t know anyone who has eaten a hamburger from Dairy Queen. In fact, I’ve never heard anything, good or bad, about a Dairy Queen hamburger because that’s not what Dairy Queen is known for, hence the name. Baskin-Robins isn’t out there trying to win back the slice of the market Wendy’s stole from them with her Frostees. Likewise, Wendy’s isn’t trying to expand on her dessert selection by offering 31 flavors of Frostees.
You Can’t Be Everything to Everyone
If a business can’t make it with the thing they’re known for, they’re not going to cement their place in the market by offering mediocre versions of what other businesses are known for. It’s like when the menu at a restaurant is thick enough to beat the rats in the kitchen to death with, you know, everything in that thing arrived frozen, and they don’t do any of it well.
So, when I saw my burger from Shake Shack, I realized that my unfamiliarity with the franchise had led me astray. I had become the freak who orders a burger at a dessert shop. A dessert shop, I should point out, that started as a hot dog stand. Shake Shack is the culinary equivalent of a 22-year-old college dropout trying to find herself.
My cheeseburger was so small that it had to be a joke or a mistake. It was something in between a McDonald’s cheeseburger and a slider on a Hawai’ian roll. I’m not really sure what the point of it was. It wasn’t made to fill you up, at least not if you’re a grown man like me. And, I don’t think it was meant to be bought in multiples, like tacos, because it cost seven fucking dollars.
Remember, back in the late 90s or early oughts, Carl’s Jr. introduced the Six-Dollar Burger. It was a massive burger that was supposed to rival expensive steakhouse hamburgers, I guess. I’m not sure; I don’t remember the propaganda. Anyway, back then, this burger would have cost 79¢ and come in a special six-pack cardboard carrier.
Not A Bad Burger, But A Meh Burger
Apart from its disappointing size (Now I know how my wife feels), I can’t even say anything particularly bad about the burger. It was just unmemorable. If you pulled into a side-of-the-road, non-descript, off-brand mini-golf course and fun center and walked up to the snack bar, this is the burger you would expect to get. It was the sort of burger you would get from the food trailer at the Little League fields. It wasn’t bad, but there’s not a chance in hell you would pay $7 for it if you knew what you were getting.
Just a few hours after my first Shake Shack experience, I saw this Tweet from a guy whining about the prices at Five Guys. I’ve never understood the ire people have about Five Guy’s prices or restaurant prices generally. You don’t have to eat out. At Five Guys, though, you get a decent-sized burger and half a lunch bag full of fries. For just $5 more than I paid at Shake Shack, I could have gone to Five Guys and been full. Also, who tips at a fast food restaurant? 🤦♂️
The Fries
The fries were crinkle-cut, which I loved about Carl’s Jr. when I was a kid. By the time I was in high school, though, they had switched to plain old straight fries. Crinkle-cut fries aren’t as special now that I can buy a gross of them from Smart & Final anytime I want. There was a period about ten years ago when we were eating so many crinkle-cut fires that it made good financial sense for us to buy a case of them from Smart & Final, so we did. Evidently, Shake Shack ran the numbers and decided it made sense for them too. Do I need to elaborate here? The fries were fucking frozen. They weren’t frozen by the time they reached me, but they were on their way back after sitting on the useless counter for so long.
The Shake
I suspect that’s what happened to the ice cream that went into my milkshake. Shake Shack uses custard in their shakes instead of ice cream, so that may have been the issue. I don’t know what custard is, why it’s substituted for ice cream, or why so many burger joints put it on the menu, but I don’t like it.
I tried it on its own at Freddy’s, but I wasn’t a fan. Adding milk to it did nothing to improve either ingredient. Actually, it would be more appropriate to say that adding the custard to the milk didn’t improve either one because it looked like someone dropped a glob of thawed and refrozen ice cream into a cup of milk, slapped a lid on it, and quietly said to themself, “Good job, man, you’re doing the Lord’s work out here.”
They’re not, obviously. The gastric hornswoggle that is Shake Shack is the reason the bible forbids the mixing of meat and dairy. Get one right, and the Lord might look the other way. Deal strictly in mediocrity, however, and you deserve to be smote.
Bonnie told a coworker Shake Shack hadn’t impressed me. Her coworker replied with genuine shock. “Everyone loves Shake Shack. I’ve never heard anyone say they didn’t like it,” she said in disbelief. “His milkshake was icy like the ice cream had been thawed and refrozen,” my wife elaborated. Her coworker responded, “Oh, I’ve never had one of their shakes,” as though that cleared up a misunderstanding.
I don’t trust the opinion of someone who hasn’t tried the thing a brand is known for. Shake Shack is the name. The implication is that they do shakes really well; otherwise, they would call themselves something else.
There’s Lots Of Blame To Go Around
It’s hard to tell exactly what I took away from my first Shake Shack experience. Admittedly, it could be argued that my expectations, and not Shake Shack, let me down. Still, it’s on the Shake Shack marketing team for not having set my expectations in advance. There’s a Shake Shack 14 miles from my house, and I had no idea until just now.
I’m not calloused enough to assume all Shake Shacks are like this one. It had only been open for a couple of weeks, after all. That wouldn’t explain the poor design choices, but it would explain some of the other issues.
My experience with chains, however, has been consistent. That’s why people like them. There isn’t much reason to think that any other Shake Shack is better than this one. I will reserve judgment of the whole franchise, though, until I am able to try one in Manhattan. If this Shake Shack is representative of the East Coast palate, however, then my first trip to New York is going to be woefully disappointing.
